As our headline notes, the vast majority of participants in the study aren’t comfortable with the relationship between the two: 90% say they aren’t sure that they’re measuring the success of their material effectively and a small but still surprising 7% aren’t measuring it at all.

Some other slightly surprising findings:

65% are using social shares to measure success, though another study published in February revealed an unfortunate truth: people share things they don’t actually readall the time

50% of participants say they want to be able to measure how much “real attention” readers are paying to their content beyond clicks and unique visitors

On that note, less than half are actually measuring time spent on sites

Here’s a chart:

The big question: what would marketers like to be measuring? The answer: influence.

60% said they want to measure how much content changes perceptions of a brand

54% want to measure its influence on purchase intent

Those numbers look surprisingly small to us. There is consensus on the purpose of content, though: 73% said it’s all about increasing brand awareness.

Of course, Contently itself provides measurement tools as do many of the software providers who pitch this very blog. It’s true that the study, like most others, doubles as a Contently promo, but it’s still very much worth a read.